Overland Revamps Its NEO Tape Libraries
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Overland Storage's new NEO E Series enterprise tape backup and archive packages use the company's homegrown and updated LTO-5 software, which consolidates disk and tape storage and essentially doubles the capacity of previous Overland deployments.
Eighteen months ago, disk and tape storage maker Overland Storage was facing
several serious business challenges.
It had just bought
the popular Snap Server franchise for $3.6 million from Adaptec at the
beginning of what was to become a worldwide recession. Tape wasn't selling all
that well, a top-level management change was in the works and the 20-year-old
company was facing a tough struggle in the market because it did not have a
deduplication feature to offer customers.
Much has changed. Now with a vibrant new CEO,
Eric Kelly, a virtually all-new group of C-level execs and a fresh outlook, the
storage company is finding that things are beginning to look up.
In addition, tape is being reconsidered by many IT managers, thanks to its
reliability, low TCO and numerous green IT
virtues.
Overland on Feb. 24 introduced a line of NEO E Series enterprise backup and
tape archive packages incorporating the company's homegrown and updated LTO-5
software, which consolidates disk and tape storage and essentially doubles the
capacity of previous Overland deployments through deduplication and
compression.
The NEO 2000E, 4000E and 8000 arrays provide nearly twice the performance and a
20 percent increase in I/O speeds compared with their LTO-4-based predecessors,
Kelly told eWEEK.
The new NEOs are capable of managing tape storage capacities ranging in size
from 45TB to 3PB and data movement rates as high as 24TB per hour, Kelly said.
Recovery and data consolidation combined
"Customers of all sizes can benefit from the high capacity, reliability
and cost-effectiveness of tape solutions for disaster recovery and long-term archiving,"
said IDC analyst Robert Amatruda. "Overland's
introduction of LTO-5 drives in its NEO tape libraries provides customers with
innovation in tape for efficient archiving, recovery and storage
consolidation."
Overland also launched what it calls the NEO Upgrade and Save Program, in which
current NEO customers receive cash rebates by upgrading their legacy NEO tape
drive technologies to faster, higher capacity LTO-5 drives, Kelly said.
The new LTO-5 tape libraries are available now. Go here for more information.
Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
